Thursday, 21 March 2013

Paper Tiger

It’s by pure chance that I came
to David Cannadine’s recently published The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our
Differences in succession to Catalin Avaramescu’s An Intellectual History of
Cannibalism, though they harmonise quite well. Both are concerned with
categories and perceptions, both with the divisions created between
‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’, both with notions of ‘Us’ and notions of
‘Them.’

Cannadine, a professional
historian who professes history at Princeton, comes to us rather in the manner
of a prosecutor, bearing a heavy indictment against the profession of
history! Actually his beginning is the profession of politics, or the
sort of simple-minded politics embraced by the likes of George W. Bush and Tony
Blair in the aftermath of 9/11, a new form of Manichaeism, with clear and
uncomplicated division between the forces of light and the forces of
dark.

Historians are to blame here,
Cannadine feels, in creating to a general mood of division and derision.
They have spent too much time, he argues, on conflict and very little on
collaboration, on disharmony rather than harmony. Above all, they have
failed to celebrate a ‘common humanity.’

The Undivided Past, if you like,
is a critique of artificial identity politics. Professor Cannadine
unveils his six paper tigers. These are religion, nation, class, gender,
race and civilization. In cementing differences and creating antagonisms,
historians made their particular choices. The overall result is a kind of
interpretive straightjacket.

The simple truth is that we have
multiple and shifting identities, a truth so simple it scarcely deserves
repeating. But the author’s blood is up and his challenge offered. He
bears down on “the conventional wisdom of single-identity politics, the alleged
uniformity of antagonistic groups, the widespread liking for polarized modes of
thought, and the scholarly preoccupations with difference.” My, how those
paper tigers fall, driven down by this mighty verbal onslaught!

Broadly speaking it’s possible to
accept elements of Cannadine’s argument. All history, to take one
example, is not the history of class struggle! But Marx and Marxism is
such an easy target, for the simple reason that ‘class’ is the weakest of all
the tigers. Old dinosaurs like Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, are now
themselves consigned to the past with a good part of their tendentious
scholarship, though they and their kind still have an abiding influence on
sections of the liberal media.

Yes, what a chimera class
politics proved to be. The whole sandcastle was swept into the sea in
1914, when the German Social Democrats, the largest Marxist party in the world,
voted for war credits, thus in a single move destroying the Second
International. Here nation trumped class, but even so Cannadine’s method
would not allow us comprehend why class-based politics became so important in
the Second Reich in the first place. Why on earth did Bismarck and Bebel
not simply celebrate ‘togetherness’? Altogether there is a conceit and
polemical blindness here that I find difficult to accept, for all of the
author’s weighty scholarship.

Actually I’m not quite sure who
the author is arguing against, beyond the ghosts of the past, those who rest in
the shade of Karl Marx or Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee. I know of no
reputable scholar today who is in thrall to any single one of the six
categories. We all know – surely we do? – just how complex the past is,
just how hopeless the search for any imperial model of explanation. The
supposed big division between Christianity and Islam sublimates a great many
internal divisions within these faiths. Historians have long been alert
to the truth that wars of religion, for example, are never exclusively about
religion. The Thirty Years War is very fertile ground here.

Cannadine is certainly no Marxist
but paradoxically he seems to have lifted notions of false consciousness from
the ideological wreckage. His fellow historians, you see, have helped to
create artificial and misleading perceptions of reality. Alas, he would
do well to remember that the task of historians is to interpret the past, not
change it. It there are conflicts the conflicts are real; if there are debates
the debates are real, if there is oppression the oppression is real. We
cannot conjure away the things we do not like or approve of by fatuous appeals
to a ‘common humanity.’ This book, for all its weightiness, is replete
with too many unsupported generalisations and too much, well, pious
intellectual conceit.

There is the professor at the end
of the lists, his tigers all knocked down. The contest was just too easy,
the false solidarities all dead. The only solidarity acceptable from this
point forward is human solidarity; it’s really as simple as that. Come,
now, ye academic historians, see the truth and abandon the artificial divisions
and celebrate those things “that still bind us together today.” Yes, I
imagine Haitian slum dwellers and Russian billionaires will be delighted to see
a celebration of a ‘common humanity’ as the profession of history sinks into a
sleep of quietism!

All history may not be the
history of class struggle, but it is the history of struggle, as Arthur
Schopenhauer rightly contended. Yes, we are all human but any attempt to
create a ‘common identity’ or a common history is a task that has failed,
destroyed by its own absurd contradictions. There is nothing new in this
observation. As long ago as the 1960s J. H. Plumb described UNESCO’s
History of Humanity as “an encyclopaedia gone berserk, or resorted by a
deficient computer.” Speaking of berserkers, there is the European
Union’s House of European History, which begins the story in 1946, because the
various national governments can’t agree on what went before! I’ll go with
Cannadine’s six categories, liberally mixed, any day over absurdities like
this, or over his hippy-like, Kumbaya approach to the past.

At the end I found that The
Undivided Past was the biggest paper tiger of all. It’s entertaining,
certainly, at least now and again, though far too prolix and dense in style. It's also wide-ranging, but that does not compensate for its deficiencies. My
most serious criticism is over the stunning banality of the central
message. Simply put, it’s almost impossible to provide an acceptable
definition of a ‘common humanity’ when one proceeds beyond the basics – we are
born, we breath, we eat, we grow, we decline, we die. That’s it, a
‘common humanity’ we share with every other species on earth.

Historians have to grapple with
the past and interpret it for the present and perhaps even the future, with as
much honesty and integrity as they can, not be seduced by cosy common room
cant. We are in the presence here of a new Francis Fukuyama.

I suggest that if the telling of history has a problem it is because we judge with hindsight and with the historian's era values and not the values current at the time that is being written about. As for paper tigers there will always be polarization as people will identify with those who have similar views to their own and as long as there are wide divides between those views. One day if humans survive long enough those different views will be so near enough similar to each other that we can all live in harmony with one another. After all that is what the UN, the EU and other similar bodies have been set up to achieve. They may on the surface not appear to be very successful in that endeavour but put in perspective in that it will require a long time frame then they indeed are. The problem being is we do not like it because generally speaking we hate change and of course we like the side effects even less.

About Me

Hi, I'm Ana! History is my passion -and that is not too strong a word - but I also enjoy politics, philosophy, art, literature and travel. In addition I have a deep interest in witchcraft, in all of the ancient arts. Apart from that I'm a keen sportswoman. I play lacrosse and tennis, but I love riding most of all. I have my own horse, Annette.